This two-hour workshop is aimed at giving programmers familiar with Ruby a comfortable introduction to Haskell, demonstrating how Haskell code and concepts can be quite similar to Ruby, and showing a few neat things Haskell does that Ruby doesn't.

You needn't be an expert Ruby programmer (or even know Ruby at all, if you have other programming experience) but you may find it difficult if code such as the following doesn't make any sense to you:

(0..7).map { |x| x*3+1 } .select { |x| x.even? }

The workshop will be highly interactive. You'll be expected to write and run small Haskell programs along with the instructor during the lecture portion, and there will be a set of simple problems to work on in pairs or groups after that. You'll need a laptop with the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (see below), a text editor and Git installed. A GitHub account will also be helpful, though not required. Please see this git repo for setup instructions.

For Linux users, installing the standard GHC or Haskell Platform package for your distribution should be fine. For Mac, you can install via brew install haskell-platform. For Windows and Mac users, we suggest downloading the Haskell Platform.